Failure is Inevitable

I just had a phone interview with an interesting author and blogger who asked me some pretty basic questions about being young entrepreneurs, taking the leap, dropping out of school and taking a year off, and the struggles with building a business.

Just a recap of the conversation:

– building a business meant finding the right team to support us, which was incredibly difficult for us as a pair of inexperienced students with just hopes and dreams, but we quickly recruited Alec and luckily stumbled upon Zee because of our active campaign for a CTO

– creating the best custom dress shirt out there was difficult because we managed our supply chain remotely and our suppliers didn’t care much about us. So, we finally moved to Shanghai to work with new suppliers to help us scale and grow

– managing a remote team was hard. It was easier than we thought, but it was still a challenge, but we had to work with it because it was our best, and only option without having to raise capital to hire local support

– building a team without money and only equity was challenging but most rewarding

– unpaid interns are awful. They lack commitment, and usually skill, and with your busy schedule, the ROI on managing them for a few hours a week and only getting back 10 hours a week is very low, if it is at all positive

– the Babson Summer Venture program certainly saw a handful (up to a dozen) unpaid interns hosted by our company. It’s not something we are proud of, but it was a good learning experience. We have tried to hire more interns like a Community Outreach Intern, and a Web Developer, but both positions failed

– we hit a lot of roadblocks and failed several times. Heck, when we were making boring bespoke suits and bespoke men’s dress shirts, the business was doomed without the proper manpower to sell our product

– failure really kills morale, but to be a good entrepreneur, you need the backbone to accept failure after failure. It’s going to be an integral part of your startup experience because you need to fail before you know what is going to work best in building your business